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About us

Experimental Tribe is a web platform designed for scientific gaming and social computation. In the last few years the Web has been progressively acquiring the status of an infrastructure for “social computing” that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of users in online communities, and steer the collective action towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social-sciences and whenever the peculiar human computation abilities are crucially required for research purposes.

Xtribe is run by a research team focused on the investigation of dynamical processes involving human beings, a series of research topics gathered under the denomination of Social Dynamics. The research team recently got funded by the Templeton Foundation for a project on "Unfolding the dynamics of creativity, novelties and innovation" .

More about the research project:

The project addresses the dynamics of novelties - a fundamental factor in the evolution of human societies, biological systems and technology- with the aim to unfold and quantify the underlying mechanisms through which creativity emerges and innovations diffuse, compete and stabilize. The project is timely due to the availability of extensive longitudinal records of human, social, biological and technological evolution. We shall exploit the unique opportunity offered by the combination of ICT tools for social computation with powerful analytical and modeling tools, by blending, in a unitary interdisciplinary effort, three main activities: web-based experiments, data science and theoretical modeling. Through this experimental, mathematical and computational framework we aim at providing the scientific community with a quantitative understanding of the determinants of creativity and innovation as well as a solid overarching scientific framework describing creativity in a quantitative and operational way. We hope to stimulate a bundle of new research lines in multiple academic and non-academic communities interested in quantifying and controlling the processes underlying creativity and innovation. By unveiling and quantifying the complex ecology of creativity and innovation, we also expect to impact sectors - education, learning, research, social challenges- where creativity and innovation are much needed fuels.

Do you like playing and take up new challenges?

Experimental Tribe represents a clear example of the so-called Citizen Science, the idea being that of involving everyone, even without a scientific background, to perform purely scientific tasks. We all solve problems everyday, sometimes just for fun. Think to games like sudoku, tetris or crosswords. Experimental Tribe allows us to take up scientific challenges while having fun.

Are you a Researcher interested in web-experiments?

Experimental Tribe help Researchers in the realization of their own web-experiments by accomplishing those necessary and tedious tasks involving the management of human resources (User registration, validation, selection and pairing, etc.). In this way Researchers can solely focus on the implementation of the core part of their experiment and forget about the rest, while keeping full control over their own experiment and full ownership of the data they gather.